The operation of these dynamics accelerated in 1917. Beginning in January, the National Woman’s Party began the unladylike activity of picketing the White House day after day, carrying signs contrasting Wilson’s broadly stated democratic utterances with his position on women’s suffrage. As the picket lines grew larger and occasionally more vociferous, the Washington police began arresting the women, which led to trials, jail terms, and hunger strikes for prominent social figures as well as dedicated recent college graduates. The courts eventually dismissed all charges against the picketers, and small-scale acts of disruption and civil disobedience continued in various locales. NAWSA, meanwhile, intensified its less flamboyant efforts on all fronts, raising money, holding public demonstrations, and lobbying state and national political leaders. Indeed, by 1917, the National Woman’s Party’s dramatic militance was serving to make NAWSA appear increasingly moderate and acceptable to mainstream politicians. State legislators in six midwestern and northeastern states (Michigan, Ohio, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Nebraska, and Indiana) responded to these efforts by adopting the precedent set in Illinois: without constitutional amendments, they altered their laws to permit women to vote in presidential elections. (See Table A. 19.)74
In November 1917, the male voters of New York made an even more striking decision, approving a state constitutional amendment that enfranchised women in all elections. This stunning victory, reversing the outcome of a referendum held only two years earlier, was made possible by a remarkable shift in the working-class and immigrant neighborhoods of New York City. Districts that had opposed suffrage in 1915 voted in favor in 1917, by margins large enough to tilt the balance in the state tally. The efforts of the WTUL and others to build a cross-class coalition finally had paid off. The Democratic machine politicians of New York had proven to be receptive to those efforts and shrewd enough to read the political winds: dropping their longstanding opposition, they remained officially neutral in the referendum, and in the end, actively worked for its passage. After the victory, one suffrage leader declared that “we owe a great debt to Tammany Hall,” and many credited Democratic politicians, especially Tammany boss Charlie Murphy, for the victory.75
The shift of Tammany to the prosuffrage column was both an emblem of and stimulant to a seismic shift in the politics of suffrage: between 1915 and 1920, machine politicians dramatically reversed course and began to favor the enfranchisement of women. Sensing correctly that suffrage was likely to triumph, that it would not necessarily damage their interests, and that their own constituents supported it, Democratic machine leaders in New York, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and other cities joined hands with NAWSA and the National Woman’s Party to promote suffrage reform; the Republican organization made a similar about-face in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Simultaneously, if more spottily, organized labor—rapidly growing in the wartime economic boom—strengthened its ties to the suffrage movement. In Connecticut, for example, a strong alliance emerged between the National Woman’s Party and the International Association of Machinists (IAM), which counted among its members thousands of munitions workers in Bridgeport. In 1919, one activist wrote to Alice Paul that Sam Lavit, the head of the Bridgeport IAM local, had “done more for the National Woman’s Party in Connecticut than any other man.” In most states, thus, the two primary organizational expressions of working-class power—political machines and the labor movement—climbed on the suffrage bandwagon. At the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1917-1918, the primary argument made in behalf of suffrage expansion was that it would benefit the “working girls and women” who were exploited in the factories and shops of the Bay State.76
1917, of course, also was the year that the United States entered World War I. The war, and preparations for it, briefly retarded and then accelerated the progress of suffrage reform. When President Wilson and Congress declared war, NAWSA, in deference to the war effort, decided to suspend its congressional lobbying, although it continued grassroots efforts to build support for a federal amendment. Militant and pacifist (often Quaker) suffragists, however, ignored NAWSA’s directives, organizing picket lines and hunger strikes, while excoriating the president for fighting for democracy abroad while undercutting it at home. These militant suffragists were often denounced as unpatriotic (or worse) by an increasingly strident antisuffrage movement that linked the right to vote with feminism, radicalism, socialism, and “German Kulture.”77
But the most critical impact of the war was the opportunity it gave suffragists to contribute to the mobilization and in so doing, to vanquish the age-old argument that women should not vote because they did not bear arms. NAWSA converted its local chapters into volunteer groups that provided Americanization classes, distributed food, and cooperated with the Red Cross. Missouri’s suffragists, thousands of whom, carrying yellow parasols, had lined the streets at the Democratic convention in St. Louis in 1916, feverishly sold bonds and thrift stamps, knitted clothes, and gave gifts to soldiers and sailors. In New York, the Woman Suffrage Party sold more than a million dollars’ worth of bonds between the declaration of war and the fall referendum of 1917, the first direct electoral test of the impact of war on the suffrage movement. The leadership of NAWSA also offered its political support—always especially valued during wartime—to the Wilson administration; both Catt and Anna Howard Shaw served on the Women’s Committee of the Council on National Defense.78
The suffragists’ adroit handling of the war crisis, coupled with continuing (if often behind the scenes) political pressure on Congress and the president, was rewarded in January 1918. The president, in an extraordinary address, announced his support of a federal suffrage amendment “as a war measure.” The next day, the House of Representatives, reversing its stance of only three years earlier, voted in favor of the Nineteenth Amendment: the victory was won by one vote, with the Democrats splitting almost evenly while more than 80 percent of Republicans voted favorably. Importantly, most of the congressmen who changed their position in those few years came from states that recently had adopted some form of women’s suffrage.79
The Senate, where antisuffrage southern Democrats constituted a proportionally larger bloc, took an additional year and a half to endorse the amendment. Addressing the Senate in September 1918, Wilson again pressed the links between war and enfranchisement. Women’s suffrage, he declared, was “essential to the successful prosecution of the great war of humanity in which are engaged. . . . We have made partners of the women in this war. Shall we admit them only to a partnership of sacrifice and suffering and toll and not to a partnership of privilege and of right? This war could not have been fought . . . if it had not been for the services of women.” Notably, Wilson was extending rather than rejecting the traditional notion that suffrage ought to be tied to military service: as was appropriate, perhaps, in the nation’s first modern war (which demanded a new level of mass mobilization), the president claimed that women should be enfranchised because of their contributions to the war rather than despite their failure to bear arms.80
Suffragists too stressed their wartime role, even threatening to diminish their support if suffrage were not forthcoming. They also campaigned hard in the 1918 elections, helping to generate new Republican majorities in Congress. After months of relentless political pressure and careful targeting of Republican and Democratic holdouts, the Senate—by a large Republican majority and a small Democratic one—finally came on board in the summer of 1919. The combination of broad, multiclass support, war, and the endgame dynamics of party competition had put the amendment over the top.81 Notably, congressional support for the Nineteenth Amendment was centered among politicians of both parties who had displayed some commitment to issues of social justice and civil rights; its last-ditch opponents were almost entirely Southerners and old-stock, probusiness Republicans such as Henry Cabot Lodge.82
The fight was not quite over. NAWSA’s leaders recognized that ratification depended on winning virtually every state outside of the South a
nd the border states; they also believed it essential to move quickly, before the aura of wartime faded. Meanwhile, antisuffragists geared up for battle, denouncing the Nineteenth Amendment as a violation of states’ rights and a giant step toward socialism and free love. Fortunately for the suffragists, however, the political tides were running in their favor, and NAWSA’s finely honed organization was well prepared for the task of navigating the Nineteenth Amendment through state legislatures. The amendment was approved with remarkable speed in much of the Northeast and Midwest; the western states, where women already were enfranchised, did not lag far behind. Texas, Oklahoma, and Connecticut proved to be battlegrounds, but successes in the first two lessened the sting of defeat in the southern New England state.83
To no one’s surprise, the South remained recalcitrant. In the hope of wooing southern votes, some politicians, such as Jeannette Rankin, as well as activists such as Catt and Paul, tried to reassure Southerners that the amendment did not threaten white supremacy (it meant “the removal of the sex restriction, nothing more, nothing less”); and NAWSA opportunistically distanced itself from black suffragists. But despite their rather unprincipled efforts, the South remained opposed, with the full-throated cry of states’ rights giving tortured voice to the region’s deep anxieties about race. Nowhere were those anxieties more vividly manifested than in Louisiana and Mississippi, where Kate Gordon and her followers actively and successfully worked to defeat the amendment; in the end, it was approved only by the four border states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, and Arkansas. Nonetheless, women everywhere, including Kate Gordon, were enfranchised. On August 18, 1920, Tennessee, by a margin of one vote, became the thirty-sixth state to vote positively on the amendment; a week later, after ratification had been formally certified, the Nineteenth Amendment was law.84
Aftermath
It is a well-known irony in American history that politics did not change very dramatically after women were enfranchised. The electorate nearly doubled in size between 1910 and 1920, but voting patterns and partisan alignments were little affected. The largest movement for voting rights in the nation’s history did not spark the revolution that some had feared but instead coincided with the return to “normalcy” in American politics. Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge were the first presidents elected with a sizable number of women’s votes, and conservative Republicans dominated political life throughout the 1920s. Women, moreover, did not rush out to vote in huge numbers: electoral turnout was even lower among women than among men. Political life in the 1920s was not nearly as vibrant or energetic as it had been in the 1890s or the latter years of the Progressive era; despite the identification of women with social reform, reforms were few during the first decade that women could vote. 85
To be sure, the entry of women into the electorate, as scholars recently have pointed out, did have many subtle and longer-range consequences for political life. New issues, particularly those affecting women and children, were injected into the political arena, even if concrete reforms were slow to materialize. The social welfare programs of the 1930s were colored by the concerns of the female electorate and often promoted by women who had cut their political and organizational teeth in the suffrage movement. To cite the most obvious example, Franklin Roosevelt’s appointment of Frances Perkins as secretary of labor (and as the first woman to hold a cabinet position) would not have happened without the Nineteenth Amendment. Women, and the experiences of the suffrage movement, also had an impact on the practice of politics—including interest group formation and techniques of voter education—and on the evolution of political cultures within each of the major parties.86
Nonetheless, the aftermath of victory was low-key, if not anticlimactic, a fact not unrelated to the movement’s success in the first place. The victories of the suffrage drive were built in part on the ever-widening perception among men that the enfranchisement of women would not significantly transform politics or policy. This perception gained currency thanks to the federal structure of voting laws and the piecemeal way in which women first were enfranchised. As was pointed out again and again in twentieth-century debates, nothing particularly unusual had happened to politics or voting patterns in states that had enfranchised women in the 1880s and 1890s, such as Colorado and Wyoming: by the time that the federal amendment was approved, women already were voting in many state and local elections, as well as in numerous foreign countries, without jarring or revolutionary consequences. The states that enfranchised women early did not even enact prohibition laws! The machine politicians who eventually tilted in favor of suffrage learned from these experiences, concluding correctly that their organizations would not be threatened by the votes of women. Similarly, the suffragists’ prediction that the enfranchisement of women would not jeopardize white supremacy in the South proved to be on the mark: although some (but not many) black women were able to register to vote, the Democratic Party remained firmly in power, segregation and black disfranchisement persisted, and the federal government steered clear of voting rights issues for another four decades.87
Sex, thus, did not prove to be a significant dividing line in the American electorate: some gender gaps in voting did occur in the early years (as well as more recently), but they were not large, and few issues sharply divided men and women. Moreover, despite the coalitions formed during the suffrage struggle, women as a group did not develop lasting alliances with other disadvantaged citizens, such as blacks and immigrants, nor did the foray of the suffrage movement into partisan politics lead to durable party loyalties. Women certainly were empowered by enfranchisement, and their lives consequently (if gradually) may have changed in a host of different ways, but they tended to vote for the same parties and candidates that their husbands, fathers, and brothers supported. Class, race, ethnicity, and religion remained the more salient predictors of a person’s voting behavior. The domestic and familial conflict over politics so vividly feared by antisuffragists never materialized. Nor did possession of the vote automatically give women full and equal citizenship in matters such as jury duty or office holding.88
The very absence of dramatic change after 1920 inescapably leaves one wondering what the adamant resistance was all about. Why, given the rather placid outcome, did so many men oppose women’s suffrage for so long? Why did it take women seventy years after Seneca Falls to become enfranchised? The historical record points to three overarching factors. The first, simply, was fear of the unknown: no one knew—especially in the nineteenth century—exactly what would happen if women voted, which permitted many different types of anxieties—political, social, and psychological—to be projected onto the specter of woman suffrage. The enfranchisement of women was something new and untested that could reach into the public and private lives of all men.
The second sustained source of resistance was the persistence of deeply ingrained standards of femininity and masculinity that appeared to be threatened by the prospect of women voting. Grounded in culture, social patterns, and the division of labor, these standards led men (and some women as well) to believe that suffrage would genuinely be a pernicious heresy, a violation of divine law, a threat to the family, or a source of promiscuity and debasement. The right to vote was an expression of masculine power, exercised in the male sphere of public life; for women to claim such power was to rob men of a piece of their identities, alter their social roles, and threaten their legal dominance over women. In the end, of course, suffrage did not generate any profound transformation in gender roles or even a powerful feminist movement. But people believed that it would, and they acted on their beliefs.
The third overarching factor was the coincidence of historical timing that brought the issue of women’s suffrage to the fore just as faith in broadly distributed political rights was beginning to diminish. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the celebratory democratic rhetoric of the 1830s and 1840s had receded into almost-dim memory. To many, voting once again had become a privilege rather than a right,
and the size of the electorate a matter of expediency rather than principle. To grant that women had a right to vote could only undercut the rationale for laws designed to restrict a male electorate that already seemed too large and unmanageable. This conservative impulse, widely present in the middle and upper classes, substantially narrowed the path down which the women’s suffrage movement was obliged to travel and in so doing, significantly retarded its progress.89
Overcoming this resistance required an immense movement, shrewdly led by experienced political operatives, energized by the participation of millions. It also took more than that. Success did not come to the suffrage movement until images and norms of gender roles began to shift under the gradual but sturdy pressure of changes in the social structure, until local experiences and evolving beliefs could relax some of the apprehensions about the potential consequences of enfranchisement. Electoral majorities in favor of suffrage were mustered only when divisions between and within the major political parties could be exploited by a single-issue movement. And victory was ushered in at the end by war. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Civil War vision of entering the polity alongside the blue-uniformed black soldier was never realized. Yet the final and decisive victories of the movement that she founded were achieved while millions of men were in uniform and millions of women were mobilized to abet their military efforts.90
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